Pesach 5773 - 18/03/2013 - Federation Of Synagogues

The Legend of YS
By Dr Eli Kienwald - Chief Executive
eternity. As with all drowned cities, it is said that on
stormy nights you can hear the bells of the church of
Ys ringing dolefully out, and sometimes even the
mournful cries of the lonely mermaid.
The great French composer Claude Debussy
(1862-1918) was one of the main exponents of the
so-called Musical Impressionism, a movement in
European classical music which appeared in the late
19th and continued into the beginning of the 20th
century. This novel style focused on a suggestion and
an atmosphere rather than on a strong emotion. One
of his most notable piano compositions is a Prelude
named ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie’ (The Submerged
Cathedral). The piece is based on an ancient Breton
myth in which a cathedral, submerged off the cost of
the Island of Ys, rises up from the sea on clear
mornings when the water is transparent. Sounds can
be heard of priests chanting, bells chiming and an
organ playing from across the sea. Debussy uses
clever and innovative harmonies to allude to the plot
of the legend which, according to several of its
versions, originated around the 11th or 12th century.
The events which gave rise to this folk tale centre on
the city of Ys, built by King Gradlon for his daughter
Dahut on the coast of Brittany. There was no city in
the world which came anywhere near the beauty and
magnificence of Ys but its inhabitants, and
particularly the Princess, were evil and corrupt. The
island was protected from the ocean by a strong
system of gates and sea-locks, with King Gradlon
carrying the only key around his neck all the time.
One night, while the king was asleep, Dahut and one
of her paramours stole the key, opened the gate and
the sea flooded into the city submerging it. King
Gradlon was so enraged with his daughter that he
threw her into the oncoming torrent where she became
a mermaid, doomed to swim the lonely seas for
Hamaor / April 2013
But is there a true story behind this legend? In the
days when simple town-folk had no means of
committing facts to written records, real events were
easily distorted with the passage of time; fiction was
added liberally to the facts, often weaving a rich
embroidery of imaginary detail into the original
narrative.
As I was researching “A Holiday to Remember” (see
Hamaor Pesach 5772), I became profoundly interested
in the relationship between St Michael’s Mount at
Marazion in Cornwall, the subject of that story, and
its twin counterpart off the coast of Normandy, Mont
Saint-Michel. The geographical correspondence between
the two tidal islands and the geophysical
similarities are wondrous miracles of nature. Equally
amazing was the discovery that that region of France,
including Brittany, the Loire Valley and Normandy,
were the site of many important Jewish communities
from Roman times and throughout the Middle Ages.
In 1976, excavations in and around the Palais de
Justice in Rouen (Normandy) yielded an unexpected
treasure: probably a yeshiva or a synagogue dating
back to the 12th Century, making it the oldest preserved
Jewish monument in Western Europe. Rouen’s
Palais de Justice is on the northern boundary of what
was the Rue de Juifs. French records from the 15th
Century describe a Jewish school on the spot.
What happened to the Jewish people of Rouen and
what is their connection with the Island of Ys and La
Cathédrale Engloutie?
In the year 1096 the Crusaders were marauding
through Europe on the way to Jerusalem. They were
pillaging and destroying and murdering in the name
of a faith about which many of them had little
understanding. Anyone who was not a practising
Christian would be at risk.
In the spring of that year, the Jews of Rouen were
baking their matzos for Pesach when a company of
Crusaders from the Rhineland descended into the
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